A farmer and his wolf, goat, and cabbage come to the edge of a river they wish to cross. There is a boat at the river’s edge that only the farmer can row. The farmer can take at most one other object besides himself on a crossing, but if the wolf is ever left with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat; similarly, if the goat is left with the cabbage, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can the farmer get all of them across?

Now we’ve got an even more intractable problem, involving a healthy job-creating economy, a Marxist president and a Marxist Democrat Party.

This one is unsolvable, because unlike the above dilemma involving the wolf, the goat and the cabbage, BOTH the Marxist President AND the Marxist Democrat Party will devour the economy unless it is somehow taken away from them. Like the goat with the cabbage, they will insatiably eat every job they can and turn those jobs into dead crap. Like the wolf with the goat, they will kill the economy and systematically devour it until only bones are left.

We are still over a year away from getting the chance to save ourselves from this insoluble dilemma.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. labor market could stay sluggish for a while, with small-business executives reluctant to hire amid the murky economic outlook.

A survey of small business owners shows a lack of
confidence in the U.S. economy. More than two-thirds indicated they do not plan
to add payrolls in 2011 or 2012. WSJ’s Siobhan Hughes reports. Photo: Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images

Almost two-thirds—64%—of small-business executives surveyed said they weren’t expecting to add to their payrolls in the next year and another 12% planned to cut jobs, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report to be released Monday. Just 19% said they would expand their work forces.

This comes after a Labor Department report Friday showed employers added few jobs in June, and unemployment rose to 9.2%. The bleak figures joined other data showing the recovery losing momentum in recent months, which has caused many analysts and policy makers to lower their forecasts for economic growth in the second half of the year.

The Small Business Administration says small businesses, defined as companies with fewer than 500 workers, employ about half of the workers in the private sector. In the Chamber’s survey of 1,409 executives, conducted by Harris Interactive, small businesses were defined as firms with revenue of $25 million or less.

More than half of the small-business executives in the June 27-30 survey cited economic uncertainty as the main reason for holding back on hiring. About a third blamed lack of sales, while just 7% pointed to problems getting credit.

“I think it’s safer to stay on hold and not hire workers,” said Harold Jackson, chief executive of Buffalo Supply, a Lafayette, Colo., distributor of high-tech medical equipment used in operating rooms.

Mr. Jackson said he has halved his staff to 15 workers since 2009 and was unlikely to start hiring soon even if his business picked up. “I can handle a reasonably large increase in business without having to increase the staff.”

Many of the executives surveyed were gloomy about the economy’s prospects. About 41% see the business climate getting worse over the next two years, compared with 29% who expect the climate to improve.

The modest hiring plans of small businesses don’t make up for the job losses in the past year, when some 29% let go workers, far outpacing the numbers that now plan to hire.

As the wise philosopher Scoobert Doo once put it upon hearing dire news, “Roh-roh.”

Between ObamaCare and the massive $500 billion in taxes it’s going to take out of the private sector, along with the 158 government bureaucracies and the thousands of pages of regulations; between the trillion dollars in NEW taxes Obama is demanding as part of any debt ceiling deal; between the Obama EPA which is simply ruling by fiat and imposing regulations that were actually voted down by Congress; between the fact that Obama won’t let us drill for our own oil even as his green energy sends the cost of energy (in his own words) “skyrocketing”; between the Obama NRLB that is openly warring with companies like Boeing for creating jobs in non-union states; between the Obama Labor Department, which is putting together some 100 job-killing regulations to strangle businesses from further hiring as we speak; and between the Dodd-Frank legislation which will systematically cut businesses off from credit, we are pretty well screwed.

We can have jobs, or we can have Obama and his Democrats. But we’re not going to get jobs until we get rid of the people who are demonizing the job creators. And that should just be an obvious fact by now.

Good article appearing on RedState. My only beef is the claim that Obama is full of “ethanol,” when we all ought to know Obama is actually full of methane (I’m guessing Horowitz was just being polite).

Many liberals in the media are expressing shock over Obama’s apparent willingness to increase oil production. We all know that he is full of …, I mean ethanol, and they do too.

Those of you who were befuddled at the news that Obama will ‘expand drilling’ in Alaska are not missing anything. Obama has pulled this political chicanery a number of times. Whenever a specific proposal that he so adamantly opposes becomes too popular to ignore, he announces his support for it by promising to implement inconsequential reforms. To that end, he declared during his Saturday radio address that he is “directing the Department of Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, while respecting sensitive areas, and to speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid and south Atlantic”.

So we are to believe that the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas and ANWR, all of which are impounded from drilling leases by the administration, are more sensitive than Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve? Caribou, baby, Caribou in ANWR; drill, baby, drill in ANPR? Think again.

President Obama announced Saturday the government would hold annual onshore lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve; extend the life of leases in the Gulf of Mexico and in some areas off the coast of Alaska for one year; speed up ongoing Interior Department testing in the mid- and south-Atlantic to gauge the level of resources; and establish an interagency task force to coordinate permitting for offshore drilling in Alaska.

The White House is making the policy shifts after taking intense criticism from Republicans in recent weeks over energy policy as gas prices have topped $4 per gallon in some parts of the country.Many of the proposals are incremental expansions of existing policies and had been set in motion prior to Saturday’s announcement. It’s also unclear by how much the plan will increase domestic oil production. (emphasis added)

Once again, Obama is attempting to diffuse disquiet over his anti-energy policies by embracing the opposition through inconsequential and empty promises. He attempted this stratagem earlier this year when he announced wholesale regulatory reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Amidst growing pressure to roll back job killing regulations, Obama announced a momentous effort to “study” onerous regulations. Needless to say, the regulations in the federal register have only grown since his vapid announcement. In fact, he is attempting to regulate every facet of our economy; from the broadband providers to oil refineries, without congressional approval. Nonetheless, he is still studying the problem.

Obama used the same ploy in his State of the Union Address by embracing popular policies, such as a corporate tax cuts and tort reform. We haven’t heard about them since the address and probably never will.

His promise to reform land lease permits and to allow drilling in Alaska is another attempt at subterfuge for the purpose of tamping down the outrage toward his job-killing, anti-growth policies. After all, didn’t the administration oppose all three GOP bills that would implement some of these very changes just last week? House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) released the following statement on Obama’s radio address:

“In the last week, House Republicans passed three bipartisan bills that will create 1.2 million jobs, triple American offshore oil production and generate $840 million in revenue – real action to produce real American energy. It’s ironic that while the White House and Congressional Democrats strongly criticized these efforts, President Obama is now taking tiny baby steps in our direction. The President is finally admitting what Republicans have known all along – that increasing the supply of American energy will help lower prices and create jobs. One weekend address announcing minor policy tinkering, while positive, does not erase the Administration’s long job-destroying record of locking-up America’s energy resources.”

As Drudge observed yesterday, Obama made the exact same pledge over a year ago, immediately preceding his inexorable and unprecedented moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Sadly, the New York Times was credulous enough to believe it and carried water for Obama by headlining a story at that time titled, “Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time.” That didn’t exactly work out according to plan.

As such, don’t be fooled by this foxhole conversion. His speech does not reflect a newfound obsequious to the will of the American people; he will never abdicate his radical ideology so easily. Moreover, his political appointees at the Department of Energy and Department of Interior will wait for the inevitable lawsuits from environmental legal defense groups to scuttle the plans. That is what the administration did when they blocked Shel Oil from drilling in the Arctic Ocean. The environmentalists are already chomping at the bit. And as is the case with every other proposal, he will encumber any meaningful drilling policies with endless environmental impact studies. It’s akin to Obama’s promises of securing the border, even as his minions at the Department of Homeland Security instruct ICE agents not to apprehend non-criminal aliens. Talk is cheap, Mr. President, and in your case, it is worthless.

Call your members of congress and request that they support H.R. 1777, which would implement comprehensive pro-energy reforms, such as opening ANWR for drilling, streamlining the permit and leasing process, and lawsuit reform (summary and commentary here). Let’s unmask Obama’s fallacious attempt at being pro-energy and make him take a stand against real energy production legislation!

Very good historical presentation of Barack Obama’s blatant dishonesty and lack of any kind of integrity.

If you actually want the domestic drilling that will reduce both short- and long-term oil prices, elect a real conservative for president. One thing is certain: you will NEVER get any kind of relief from Barack Hussein Obama.

So the US Federal Reserve is not exempt from the laws of supply and demand. Theory suggests creating more dollars should make each worth less. Sure enough, the Fed’s own measure of the trade-weighted dollar in real terms – the best way to do long-term currency comparisons – is at its lowest since the dollar floated in 1973.

For those of you who need a picture to understand what is being said, I shall do my best to provide:

For those of you who simply could not see this coming, I have another useful illustration for you:

I am just so shocked. I thought QE2 would be a smashing success after the wonders of QE1.

We need another massive stimulus. Failure squared = success.

This chart explains something profound:

You can bet on gold because Obama can’t ruin it’s value. You can bet on oil because Obama is making it more and more valuable with his moronic policies.

But DON’T bet on the dollar. Don’t bet on anything that Obama can get his fumble-fingered mitts on.

Here’s a similar snapshot of reality:

It sounds like a Murphy’s law: “When a total fool occupies the White House, the value of gold increases proportionately.”

Remember back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats because his failed energy policies had us in long communist-proletariat-peasant-bread-line-style lines for shockingly expensive gas and fuel oil?

Well, as we keep telling you over and over again, it’s Welcome back, Carter all over again.

Shivering in the dark and freezing at night was not an answer to America’s energy needs then, and it isn’t one now.

Speaking of “now,” Obama’s got a new, modern version of Carter’s “Energy? We don’t need no stinkin’ energy!” policies:

“I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. You’re one of them? Well, now, here’s my point. If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon–(laughter)–you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then. (Laughter.) . . .So, like I said, if you’re getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. You can get a great deal. I promise you, GM or Ford or Chrysler, they’re going to be happy to give you a deal on something that gets you better gas mileage.”

One of the few remaining decent newspapers in the country wrote that Obama sans teleprompter line up this way:

The transcript shows that Obama got lots of laughs. But presumably he was speaking to a friendly audience–to people who regard the burning of gasoline as sinful and who, at least in theory, are attracted to the idea of $8-a-gallon gasoline.

People like that, to paraphrase Pauline Kael, live in a rather special world. For most Americans (we Manhattan residents are a notable exception), driving is a day-to-day necessity, and high gas prices are a constant source of economic pain. Sure, if you’re driving a guzzler, it might make sense to trade it in. But not everyone has the money lying around to buy a new car at the drop of a hat. And owners of dinky cars and hybrids still have to buy gasoline for them.

One might point out in the president’s defense that he is putting his money–haha, we mean your money–where his mouth is. Last week, as the Detroit News reported, Obama announced a plan “to ‘green’ the federal fleet”:

“I’m directing our departments and our agencies to make sure 100 percent of the vehicles they buy are fuel-efficient or clean energy cars and trucks by 2015.Not 50 percent, not 75 percent–100 percent of our vehicles,” Obama said.

Well, maybe not quite 100%. The News also reports that “some federal vehicles for law enforcement and security purposes will be exempt”–among them “the GM-built Cadillac presidential limousine and other vehicles in the motorcade.”

Then again, Obama does atone by spending a lot of time in golf carts.

President Obama’s answer to the question about high gas prices is reminiscent of candidate Obama’s 2008 disquisition on the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania, although the latter was not meant for public consumption. There’s little doubt that he believes these things, that he is a creature of the liberal self-styled elite. But if he doesn’t get better at concealing it, voters may think about a trade-in next November.

It’s not that Obama is just unrealistic and completely out of touch with America’s needs in relation to his far-leftist socialist radical redistributionist policies, it’s that he is simply factually wrong. An article titled “Obama fudges on oil production; snarks at big families” deals with a number of remarks Obama made during the appearance immortalized in the quote above that are simply wrong, period.

But let’s just deal with one of them, the hybrid van. There ISN’T a hybrid van. And there won’t be one any time soon:

And finally, President Obama was asked about rising fuel prices at a town hall last week and his answer raised some conservatives’ eyebrows. Now car experts are weighing in as well.

The president said — quote — “If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon, you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many [kids do] you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then.”

However, Edward Loh of Motor Trend Magazine says a 12-person hybrid passenger van does not exist because — quote — “for hybrids to be effective, weight must be kept down. It wouldn’t be feasible to have a vehicle that large also be a hybrid.”

And Edmunds.com agrees, saying there are no hybrid vans that accommodate 10 or more people.

Obama keeps mocking us. We’re the bitter clingers he vilified and continues to vilify every day. But neither he nor the liberal moral idiots nor the liberal moral idiot propagandists who call themselves “journalists” realize the joke is constantly on him.

Within two days of Bush’s signing the executive order, the price of oil dropped from nearly $145 a barrel to $130.73 a barrel. And within four days, it had dropped to $128.88. And Harry Reid wants to take credit for this drop in price with his incredibly airheaded speculation bill that never really had a chance of overcoming a filibuster to begin with?

In the House, Democrats are putting the energy bill on the “suspension calender” in a move that will require a 2/3 majority to pass any legislation, but which prevents the Republicans from adding ANY amendments to allow for drilling on federal lands or contribute in any way.

Democrats are so paranoid that a drilling amendment might be introduced that they would rather scuttle any meaningful vote whatsoever.

Why did President Bush lift the ban?:

The White House announced today that President Bush will lift an executive order banning offshore oil drilling, a move aimed at stepping up pressure on Congress to end the prohibition it imposed in 1981.On July 14, President Bush ended the executive ban on offshore drilling. The very next day saw the price of oil take the biggest drop in 17 years.

At the time George Bush ended the ban on offshore drilling, oil cost $147 a barrel. Oil had become more and more and more expensive in a staggering trend. But from the moment – the moment – Bush ended the ban, oil prices immediately began to go down in a constant trend as the industry reacted to the idea that more oil would be available. Within six months, the price of a barrel of oil had gone down to $37.

But a new president came along, and the market realized that he had an anti-business, anti-oil and anti-growth policy. And the markets reacted accordingly.

The event was not covered by the press, but sources confirmed the exchange to Politico.

But according to multiple people in the room, Clinton, surprisingly, agreed with Bush on many oil and gas issues, including criticism of delays in permitting offshore since last year’s Gulf of Mexico spill.

“Bush said all the things you’d expect him to say” on oil and gas issues, said Jim Noe, senior vice president at Hercules Offshore and executive director of the pro-drilling Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition. But Clinton added, “You’d be surprised to know that I agree with all that,” according to Noe and others in the room.

Clinton said there are “ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn’t need it,” according to Noe and others.

“That was the most surprising thing they said,” Noe said.

The two former presidents both generally agreed on the need to get offshore drilling workers back on the job.

Clinton and Bush also agreed on the need for more domestic shale gas production, with Clinton noting that it has been done safely for years in his home state of Arkansas.

Obama gave a speech in which he took credit for Bush and Clinton-era policies even as his own policies were strangling oil production. And even Clinton had to agree that Obama’s policies were ridiculous and counter-productive.

It’s just a small little part of “No, no, no! Not God bless America, God damn America!”

For the record, it isn’t just Obama’s stupid and morally idiotic energy policies that are creating this self-inflicted open and infectious wound plaguing Americans at every fill-up. There are other stupid and morally idiotic Obama policies at work, too. Obama has seriously devalued the U.S. Dollar with his reckless spending policies. The world oil supply is bought and sold in U.S. dollars. And OPEC sure isn’t going to pay for Obama’s weak dollar. Thus as the value of our dollar goes down, the more worthless dollars it will take to buy a barrel.

We need to get this fool and the fool Democrats out of power. America’s very survival is at stake.

CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) – You paid more last month for practically everything you bought.

From food to gas to airfare tickets – even clothing.

And now the price of everything is about to go up again.

A new report from The Labor Department indicates its concern about inflation, and businesses are claiming they can’t absorb the rising cost of commodities alone. Many say they’ll have no choice but to raise prices and shrink packages. Frustrating stuff for an economy that’s supposed to be recovering.

“Things are just not going well,” says Charlotte resident Lisa Bettinghouse. “You have to eat, but you can only have what you can afford, and now it’s getting scary.”

Bettinghouse needs a plan. She’ll be asking herself tough questions, and so should you.

What things should you stock up on now?

What things can you do without?

Take bottled water. Every time you purchase one of these, you already pay a 4,000% markup. Time to reevaluate your tap.

And you should also rethink fruits and vegetables. Right now many stores fly them in, and with the price of fuel, well, you know how expensive they already are.

Since Obama was elected, I’ve been saying that a third of American voters would continue to support Obama even if he led us into the stone-age-like conditions that Kim Il Jong has led his people into. We could be living in the dark and freezing at night, and scratching our own fecal matter from the ground in order to have something to burn, and this group of people would still adore their Dear Leader.

The media propaganda and “the state” are so behind Kim Jong Il that even as people starve to death and die, they thank their lucky stars for their “Dear Leader.” The tiny, emaciated people hang pictures of him in their homes and even literally worship him. And then I think of Obama, the mainstream media and the government unions.

You voted for our Manchurian candidate. Now you’ve got the hell you voted for. You got food that’s twice as expensive but packaged in smaller containers to fool Democrats and other total idiots.

Now, you can either believe Obama’s lies even as he continues to blame everybody but himself for going on three years of abject failure and worsening conditions, or you can join the growing numbers who want this clown and his Democrat party of clowns out of our lives.

Obama talked about America facing a “Sputnik moment” last night. For the record, “Sputnik” was a Soviet successful satellite that stunned America out of its complacency. America entered the space race with a vengeance, and won it by a knockout. Obama exploited that moment, pointed out that America is watching the world go past us, and says we need to be competitive by pursuing massive government spending oops I mean “investment.”

But he did evoke a huge defense issue from a half-century ago—the signal wake-up security call that marked the years of transition from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, the single word that has symbolized ever since the fear of slipping behind in a dangerous world: Sputnik.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” Obama said. As a result, we need to fund “a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the space race.”

Well, at the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech were many contradictions. And I’ll get to them. But his “Sputnik moment” thing was the worst one of all.

Allow me to cite a couple of my own articles to document just how stunningly pathetic Obama’s analogy truly is:

The first article above documents how Obama has been GUTTING the space program, and in fact RETURNING AMERICA to the pre-Sputnik vulnerability. To the disgust and open contempt of former NASA heroes. And the second documents how Obama has turned the now disgraced NASA into yet another tool for political correctness.

And to make sure you realize how pathetically laughable Obama’s analogy is, let’s make sure we understand that Sputnik was a Russian threat, and then let’s make sure we understand how Obama has helped undermine American interests to advance the Russians with yet another title:

But sadly we must take Obama seriously. Because Obama’s real political genius comes down to one simple thing: he realized that the people who support him are stupid and ignorant, don’t know a damn thing that the incredibly biased media machine doesn’t tell them, and that he can therefore spit out anything and not get caught by much of America in his deceit.

Obama is our Sputnik moment. By which I mean, this turd-in-chief and his policies are the reason that we are failing and falling behind while other nations around us rise up and overtake us.

One of the other major contradictions of Obama’s speech are that he is essentially acting as if the previous two years didn’t happen. “Nothing to see over there, folks, now if you don’t mind looking this way.” Obama is saying that we need a major new “investment” (which is a tidy euphemism for yet more government pork), when in fact he has already “invested” well over a trillion dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it but more debt and more deficits than this nation has ever seen before.

Which is why DeMint said:

When asked about President Obama’s statements about government investments, DeMint said, “Now the president is promising more spending, which he calls investments, when the time is to cut spending in Washington.. The president needs to tell the American people the truth.. That its time for the federal government to do less.”

Let’s look at Obama’s trillions in “investment” and see what effect it has had on our “competitiveness”:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States spends more public and private money on education than other major countries, but its performance doesn’t measure up in areas ranging from high-school graduation rates to test scores in math, reading and science, a new report shows.

That dates back to 2003. Look before that, look after that, and the results are the same. We spend and spend and spend while our kids get dumber and dumber and dumber. To the extent that right now only a third of our kids are considered proficient in major subjects.

Here’s the problem: liberals call for more and more and more spending, but liberals make sure that all the largess goes to them, and goes to their politically connected interests. Like the liberal teachers unions that are the REAL reason our country is falling behind in education. And to the extent we spend more, we only feed the beast that is the REAL source of our dilemma and help build it into an even BIGGER problem as it uses its vast resources to protect the status quo.

Obama wants to spend billions on “green energy.” What that means is that he wants to subsidize incredibly expensive and NON-Competitive energy sources while our rivals continue to run circles around us with cheap and efficient oil and coal. And the more and the faster we spend, the more and the faster we fall behind.

The real sputnik moment, epitomized in the person of Obama himself, is this: America is spending itself into extinction. It is not wise spending, because we are sucking money out of the efficient private sector, giving to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful federal government, and then doling it out on the basis of political patronage rather than common sense.

I’ll end with this: Obama is using a “mangled multiplier” as his basis for the need for more government spending. On Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s distorted view, for every dollar the federal government spends, we get a $1.55 “bang for our buck.” But it isn’t true. Unless you really think building tunnels for turtles, bridges to nowhere and studying cow flatulence is going to make America great. On the International Monetary Fund model, which just makes more sense in addition to being less ideologically biased, we only get back 70 cents for every dollar spent. See this article for the documentation on that, and check out this graph:

In his SOTU speech, Obama provided an airplane metaphor that went:

“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”

On Obama’s metaphor, government is the engine that flies our economy. And if you reduce government spending, you eliminate the engine and the plane crashes. But that simply isn’t true; it is PRIVATE spending that flies our economy. And sucking money out of the private sector to create more government bureaucracy and more pork-barrel spending is foolhardy. It is actually OBAMA who is actually removing the engine from our economy.

If we really want to experience a “Sputnik moment” and surge back to greatness, what we need to do is wake up and vote out Obama and the Democrat Party.

And so it begins, and on the most fertile red-state territory in the nation. Texas, which got four more seats in the House through the 2010 Census reapportionment, has had its air-quality rules superceded by the EPA as part of its aggressive new action on carbon emissions. Governor Rick Perry promises a fight:

The EPA also set up a framework for regulating greenhouse gas emissions in seven other states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Oregon and Wyoming. In addition, the agency set a timetable on establishing regulated levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

The action will give the EPA permitting authority over refineries, power plants and cement facilities in Texas, the agency said, but will not affect small pollution source facilities, such as restaurants and farms.

Well, perhaps not directly, but the increase in energy prices and shortages created by the EPA imposition of what will essentially be carbon taxes will impact businesses throughout the Texas economy, as well as consumers who ultimately pay the costs of the regulatory regime. Rick Perry has signaled a court fight to stop the EPA and the Obama administration:

Texas is the only state that has refused to implement the new rules. President Barack Obama is pressing ahead with the regulations after Congress failed to pass legislation capping carbon emissions. Perry, a Republican, calls the rules overreaching by the federal government that will cripple his state’s economy.

“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a huge target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers by implementing unnecessary, burdensome mandates on our state’s energy sector, threatening hundreds of thousands of Texas jobs and imposing increased living costs on Texas families,” Katherine Cesinger, a Perry spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement.

The timing is certainly interesting. The EPA made this move two days before Christmas, when most people had stopped paying attention to political news. The EPA’s move thus got missed by most of the national media, even though it demonstrates well the Obama strategy in 2011 to win through regulation what it could not win through legislation. And by focusing on Texas, where Republicans have a chance to redistrict with practically no interference from Democrats, the move will certainly incentivize the GOP to limit as much as possible the representation of Democrats in their Congressional delegation as the Republican-controlled House attempts to stymie the EPA’s regulatory innovation.

This also will vault Rick Perry to the highest level of national politics, even as he continues to insist that he won’t run for President. With a third term as governor in hand and a perfect political battle opening in front of him, though, the opportunity may be too much to resist for a man who could possibly unite conservatives and the GOP for a big run against a stumbling Obama in 2012.

There’s a joke I remember: What’s the difference between an American [capitalist] and a European [socialist]? The American capitalist is riding on a bus and sees a man driving a fancy sports car and thinks, “Some day I’ll be able to afford a car like that.” Versus the European socialist who is riding on the bus and sees the same thing and thinks, “Some day that sonofabitch will be riding the bus just like me.”

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

We voted for an evil and arrogant man whose only valuable skill was the ability to read from a teleprompter screen.

Barack Obama spent more than 20 years in a church that literally prayed that God would damn America. His personal arrogance invited divine damnation.

It appears we have very likely got what we wanted: an America no longer under God’s protection, but only under Obama’s.

It’s technical, but not intractably so, if you’re willing to concentrate for half an hour and chase down the links.

It’s also deeply pessimistic about our chances of doing anything much about the Gulf oil spill.

In brief:

● BP drills a hole down through many layers of rock, of different strength and consistency, to the oil.

● The oil will then come up through this bore hole at great pressure.

● You do NOT want that pressure forcing the oil sideways into upper levels of the drilled-through rock.

● So you line the bore hole with steel casing, and cement in the space between casing and bore hole wall. This is deep-drilling S.O.P.

● Evidence from the Top Kill failure suggests that this casing-cement system is now fatally compromised.

● So we have “down hole leaks” — oil under colossal pressure forcing its way sideways into below-sea-bed rock formations.

● If you had (which of course we don’t) some massive cork to jam into the top of the bore hole and stop the gusher, all that sideways-leaked oil would just come bursting out through fissures opening up in the sea floor.

● For miles around.

● And even though we don’t have such a cork, the bore hole might collapse in on itself, with the same effect.

As the writer says: “The very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more.”

In slightly different words: The best we can hope for is that the thing just goes on gushing through the bore hole indefinitely. (Or until we can drill enough relief wells to reduce the pressure. Don’t hold your breath.)

I’m as horrified as anyone by this — if the guy has got it right, and I’ve understood him correctly. At the same time, as a constitutional pessimist, I’ll own to a certain grim satisfaction. The infantile optimism of post-JFK America may have met its match down there in the Gulf. Nature is not mocked.

If this analysis is correct, the consequences for America will be so devastating that they can’t be overstated.

The author says “Nature is not mocked.” I say God is not mocked.

Dr. Anne Wortham wrote an inspired article entitled, “No He Can’t” shortly after Obama’s election victory. On her highly insightful view, what won in 2008 was an attitude of helplessness begging for deliverance by a pseudo-messiah of big government socialistic bureaucracy.

A writer from The Times in England, taking note of all the incredible arrogance of the Obama campaign, said the very day after Obama’s inauguration, “Obama may be the ‘no we can’t’ president.” In hindsight, it seems readily obvious that Daniel Finkelstein was right.

Is what is happening God’s divine judgment on America for it’s foolishness and wickedness in electing an evil man? I don’t know. God doesn’t tell me when He’s judging a nation. But I DO know that God DOES judge nations (see Psalm 82:8; 96:10; 110:6; Joel 3:12). And I DO know that even liberal sources such as the Huffington Post (and see also here) and Newsweek are using the word “apocalypse” to describe the terrible Gulf oil disaster. Maybe these liberal and very likely godless writers don’t realize it, but the term “apocalypse” is loaded with the sense of the revealing of divine judgment.

I also know that God is not mocked, and that whatever men sow, they will also reap (Galatians 6:7).

I am not a prophet, and God has not revealed to me that He is judging America for its departing from Him and turning to a false messiah who hates and mocks His ways:

But in my own heart, I believe that God is beginning to judge America by withdrawing His favor from this once great nation.

The following article by Mark Steyn is brilliant. My title isn’t an accurate summary of Steyn’s point (but maybe it got you to read an article you otherwise wouldn’t have read!).

It is certainly beyond hilarious that pro-Obama Democrat Stanley McChrystal and pro-Obama BP are now on the outs in a cloud of self-destruction, while George Bush’s Secretary of Defense and George Bush’s general have been called upon to save the day.

But the real meat of the article gets to the heart of one issue: Barack Obama is an empty suit who stands for nothing beyond self-promoting Barack Obama.

What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they’re both Democratic Party supporters.

Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.

But what do McChrystal’s and BP’s defenestration tell us about the president of the United States? Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the senator.

He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.

The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.

After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human-rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it.

Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi “quagmire,” was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

To return to Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Wasn’t he kind of unengaged by the health care debate? That’s why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democratic Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be “I don’t want to hear about it.” Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama’s war would be run by Bush’s defense secretary and Bush’s general?

Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated “General Betray-us” ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be.

It’s hard to fight a war without war aims, and, in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

Too bad we elected a president who has a narcissism complex where his conscience should be and a vacuum where his soul should be.

Sand berms are an insurance policy meant to protect the Louisiana coastline from oil spill damage. The Louisiana sand berm venture involves moving “sand from a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico and pumping it closer in to shore to build manmade barrier islands.”

Nevertheless, lacking a more formidable idea and one week into the project the federal government decided to shut “down the dredging that was being done to create protective sand berms in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal staunchly supports protecting the coastline with a sandy barricade, which may explain why the “berm issue has created its own toxic friction between Louisiana and the Obama Administration.”

It seems that ever since Obama took over the reins of reason the government’s first-and-foremost effort is directed at implementing the illogical, obstructing progress and public wellbeing and placing the vulnerable at risk.

Thus, while the duffer- president concentrates on sand bunkers on the golf course, the environmentally alert, “Obama Administration has asked for a halt on dredging sand berms off the Chandeleur Islands … until the project can be relocated farther into the gulf.

Federal costs, environmental concerns and efficiency are likely at the center of the controversy. As a result, the coast of Louisiana is officially the first victim whose future is at the mercy of an Obama-style “death panel.” Bureaucratic technicalities will determine the extent of damage that will ensue before federal approbation either, administers critical care, or just allows the patient to die, one or the other.

If Obama refuses to lift the ban on the dredging plan Plaquemines Parish President, Billy Nungesser might be the next one called in for a presidential reprimand for public insubordination.

Nungesser, “one of the most vocal advocates of the dredging plan, sent a letter to President Barack Obama, pleading for the work to continue.” The outspoken sand-berm proponent claims, “Once again, our government resource agencies, which are intended to protect us, are now leaving us vulnerable to the destruction of our coastline and marshes by the impending oil.”

Billy Nungesser targeted Obama as the only “hope for continuing the work.” In an unforgiving dispatch Billy outlined viable options for the President to consider. Nungesser begged, “Don’t shut us down, let us lay the pipe three miles out and then … move the dredge so we will be down less than a day and we’ll refill the hole.”

Nungesser reminded Obama of the “threat of hurricanes or tropical storms,” which would put the Gulf coast “at an increased risk for devastation … from the intrusion of oil.”

What Nungesser fails to grasp is how a hurricane or tropical storm, coupled with tornadoes of spinning oil would be tailor made for an administration that cultivates and exploits any crisis that fortuitously comes along.

You’re not supposed to notice that Obama’s death panel machine is alive and well, and just waiting to get its chance to decide who lives and who dies in your home.

Instead, we’ve had a bunch of Obama photo ops. Instead, we’ve had Obama walking on the beach in slacks stopping and stooping to pick up a few tar balls. Instead, we’ve had a collection of demagogic “here’s someone else you can blame instead of me” speeches.

And what has Obama proposed as his solution? Nothing that could cap the damn hole, but his socialist cap-and-trade which he himself said would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.” In the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, Obama has stoked the boilers for more Marxism. And the more oil that pours across our coasts, the better.

What has Obama proposed? He has proposed a ban, or moratorium, on offshore drilling. Would this cost a permanent loss of tens of thousands of jobs (in fact, well over 100,000 jobs) as drilling platform operators relocate long-term to other countries? Of course it would. Would it in fact actually result in more danger to the environment, as it would entail capping and then eventually uncapping wells – the most dangerous part of the entire drilling procedure, as we should frankly all realize by now? Of course it would. Would it effectively amount to a ban on ALL American drilling, such that we were at the complete mercy of foreign oil who presumably have the basic intelligence to not undermine their own economies and their own security? Of course it would.

Fortunately, a judge struck down Obama’s newest naked power grab as “overbearing,” “rash,” and “heavy handed.” In other words, Obama acted in an incredibly Stalinist manner, didn’t he?